Speed, simplicity and self-confidence are important elements in becoming and maintaining a competitive business. As competitiveness in a marketplace increases, quickly responding to specific demands within the market becomes increasingly important. If one competitor fails to quickly respond to a consumer's demand, then the consumer's demand may substantially decrease, at least with regard to products of the one competitor. The consumer may use a suitable substitute product from another competitor.
Many factors contribute to slowing the process of bringing a product to market, thereby weakening the competitiveness of a business. Complexity of a product contributes to the difficulties in meeting specific consumer demands in a timely manner. The complexity of world-wide production, the changing nature of competition, and even the complexity internal to production companies, generally slow the process of bringing a new or even modified product to market.
For example, motors generally are complex products, and in order to meet specific consumer demands, a complex design and implementation process must be completed. For the consumer, however, the time period required for delivery may be too long. The consumer may therefore resort to substitute products of another competitor.
In order to speedup the pace at which consumer demands for a new or modified product are satisfied, manufacturers utilize bill-of-material systems. The term "bill-of-material", as generally understood in the art and as used herein, refers to a parts explosion listing. Specifically, a product may have many subassemblies, some or all of which may have further subassemblies. A bill-of-material is a printed-out parts list having indentations where the indentations correspond to a depth of hierarchy of each product in each subassembly. The bill-of-material traditionally has been utilized during the manufacturing process of an assembly to provide a reference for the relationship of each component to other components in the assembly.
An example of a system for generating a bill-of-material is described in Ferriter et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,847,761. In the Ferriter et al. system, a bill-of-material generation process begins by producing a functional model of a product design. In order to generate the functional model, the user must know each part required to meet the design specifications, i.e. the user must formulate and apply rules to determine proper subassemblies. The functional model is in the form of a hierarchy tree structure. The tree structure is assigned an item number and stored in a database. Once a tree structure for a product is established, a user can view the hierarchical tree, check it for correctness and modify it, if necessary. From this tree structure, the Ferriter et al. system generates a bill-of-material.
With known systems, such as the system described in the above-identified patent, in order to generate a bill-of-material for a specific assembly, a user must first input a functional model into a database. Inputting functional models for each assembly is a time-consuming process. For example, in a motor context, each motor contains many subassemblies such as a rotor assembly, stator assembly, frame, end shield, and other parts. Many components, such as the rotor assembly, further decompose into more subassemblies, such as a shaft, laminations, nuts, and bolts. In practice, therefore, full automation for bill-of-material generation for all model designs would take many man-years to implement. By the time such a complete system was implemented, the models probably would be partially out of date and require additional modeling.
Design accuracy and consistency with these known systems is highly dependent upon the expertise of a person who creates and enters the functional model for each new product. These known systems therefore also are susceptible to errors and inconsistent design techniques. Further, in order to implement a new design technique, each model must be reanalyzed and structured. This process also is very time-consuming and increases the cost and time required to bring a product to market.
Moreover, and importantly, although identifying component parts aids in speeding the process of bringing a product to a market, until now, no known system provides generation of an assembly hierarchy from design specifications alone. Specifically, no known bill-of-material system provides that a new or modified product can be automatically designed using assembly hierarchy information of previously designed products. Further, no known system automatically acquires rules which guide construction of a new product and its bill-of-material. Automatically constructing assembly hierarchies and generating rules to guide construction of a new product further reduces the time required to bring new and modified products to market.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an automated bill-of-material generation system which generates a bill-of-material from design specifications.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an automated bill-of-material generation system which facilitates bringing a new or modified product to a market within a short period of time.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide an automated bill-of-material generation system which enables electronic storage of all variations of a specific assembly.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide an automated bill-of-material generation system which enhances the accuracy and consistency of design techniques.
Still yet another object of the present invention is to provide an automated bill-of-material generation system which automatically generates assembly hierarchies and automatically generates rules to guide construction of new or modified products.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an automated bill-of-material generation system which reduces the cost in bringing a product to market.
Still another object of the present invention to provide an automated bill-of-material generation system which facilitates speed, simplicity and self-confidence in bringing a product to market.